Little Faggot Sessions gloats over the destruction of two more free marketplaces

[crimethink]

People who depend upon TOR and Bitcoin must pay close attention to just how the System take down these marketplaces...


http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/342904-doj-takes-credit-for-dark-net-markets-demise

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40670010

[crimethink]

Sessions: Trump Directed Law Enforcement Agencies to Go After Darknet Markets Like AlphaBay

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6oid15/sessions_trump_directed_law_enforcement_agencies/

https://coinjournal.net/donald-trump-law-enforecement-darknet-markets/


“[Trump] gave us several directives,” said Sessions. “One is to dismantle internet transnational criminal organizations. That is what we are announcing today. Dismantling of the largest dark website in the world by far.”

[singular_me]

as long as money exists YOUR/OUR money will NEVER be safe... COMPETITION is an HOAX because it is competition that holds the pyramid straight up

when AI is here, nobody will never make any money anymore... basic universal income and the ant colony... my solution of a money-free society is the ONLY way out!!! Our salvation lies in the UNknown... in what has not been experimented, such as in science and thus philosophy

====================================
Around $7.4M STOLEN In Ethereum From Coindash ICO!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDHZ7RZ5eqw

[boogietillyapuke]

“We know of several Americans who were killed by drugs on AlphaBay,” Sessions added.



Know of any killed by drugs from a pharmacy, Mr. Sessions?

[singular_me]

always same scenario our criminal society gives freedom some slack to take it back and enforce more crackdowns. There is no progression without a resistance, but for us and ((them)) the resistance is different. Any bit of freedom is a bait in their framework. ((They)) win all the time because people have no clue about this Natural Law

reclaiming the mind (right to think for ourselves) is all we can do
==============================

Donald Trump Orders DOJ To Takedown Darknet Markets
23 July 2017 GMT

http://www.activistpost.com/2017/07/donald-trump-orders-doj-takedown-darknet-markets.html

corbett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLFjgk4tVcY

[cheka.]

something is up

http://www.totpi.com/alleged-operator-of-alphabay-alexandre-cazes-found-dead-in-thai-prison/

Alleged Operator of Alphabay -- Alexandre Cazes Found Dead In Thai Prison

July 15, 2017/0 Comments/in Crime /by Joe Levin


A 26-year-old Canadian found dead in his Thai police cell this week was wanted in the US for allegedly running a massive “dark web” marketplace for drugs and other contraband, a police source told AFP news agency on Saturday.

Thai police arrested Alexandre Cazes in Bangkok on July 5 and had planned to extradite him to the US, where he faced drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

But the computer programmer hanged himself with a towel in his detention cell a week later on July 12, according to Thai anti-narcotics police, who have been tight-lipped on the details of his case.

On Saturday a Thai officer confirmed Cazes was accused of being an “operator” of a major online black market.

“It’s a huge dark web market that trafficks drugs and sells other illegal stuff,” the police officer said, requesting anonymity.

Speculation is rife that the underground marketplace was AlphaBay, considered the world’s largest and most lucrative darknet bazaar until it was taken down within hours of Cazes’ arrest.

Like its predecessor Silk Road, which was shut down by the FBI in 2013, AlphaBay used the encrypted Tor network and virtual currencies like Bitcoin to shield customers from detection.

According to Nicolas Christin, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, AlphaBay gained prominence in 2015 and mostly traded in drugs, stolen credit cards and forged IDs.

It was “more than twice as big as Silk Road was in its heyday, with a revenue of somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 dollars a day in early 2017, and that’s a rather conservative estimate,” he told AFP.

Cazes appeared to be living a life of luxury in Thailand, where he owned three houses and four cars – including a Lamborghini – according to Thai police who have seized the assets.

He slipped into the country around eight years ago, according to police.

“He was a computer expert involved with international transactions of Bitcoins,” said Major General Soontorn Chalermkiat, a spokesman for Thailand’s Narcotics Suppression Bureau.

“He didn’t have any business in Thailand but he had many houses,” the officer said, adding that Cazes’ Thai wife has since been charged with money laundering.

The US Embassy in Bangkok refused to comment on the details of the case, saying only that Cazes was detained at the request of the US “with a view toward extradition to face federal criminal charges”.

The founder of Silk Road – the world’s first and most famous digital drug market – was sentenced to life in prison by federal court in New York in 2015.

[singular_me]

is it why they legalized bitcoin, to allow rothschild to get into the pool??
=====

Rothschild Investment Corporation Becomes Bitcoin Stakeholder

A major mainstream investment company, Rothschild Investment Corporation, has embraced cryptocurrency by investing in bitcoin. The company recently filed a holdings report that solidified this investment move. They bought shares of the GBTC, or the bitcoin investment trust, which acts as a share that tacks its value to bitcoin’s price.

Also read: What Every Bitcoiner Should Know About ‘Bitcoin Cash’

The Econotimes covered the facts: “According to the details provided, Rothschild Investment Corporation has acquired shares of Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC) for $210,000.”

Bitcoin shares began public trading via Bitcoin Investment trust on March of 2015. This move by Rothschild Investment Company represents a major mainstream player hedging bets on the future value of bitcoin.

https://news.bitcoin.com/rothschild-investment-corporation-becomes-bitcoin-stakeholder/
www.econotimes.com/Rothschild-Investment-Corporation-invests-in-bitcoin-via-Bitcoin-Investment-Trust-816275

[crimethink]

The Rothschild Crime Syndicate knows Bitcoin isn't going away, so co-opting it, as they typically do, is the best alternative.

"The best way to control the 'opposition' is to lead it ourselves."

[cheka.]

they'll kill it with derivatives. roll out skype controlled version

[EE_]

U.S. Signals Clampdown on Red-Hot Digital Coin Offerings
By Matthew Leising
‎July‎ ‎25‎, ‎2017‎ ‎5‎:‎16‎ ‎PM Updated on ‎July‎ ‎25‎, ‎2017‎ ‎6‎:‎10‎ ‎PM

SEC says ICOs, cryptocurrency exchanges subject to U.S. law

U.S. regulators said they have jurisdiction over one of the hottest new areas of finance: initial coin offerings of digital currencies.

Companies that raise money through the sale of digital assets must adhere to federal securities laws, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday. Issuers must register the deals with the government unless they have a valid excuse, as should exchanges that offer trading of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, the regulator said.

“It’s been a long time coming and this is a big deal,” said Angela Walch, associate professor at St. Mary’s University School of Law. “People have been waiting for some kind of signal from regulators on ICOs.” This is the most detailed the SEC has been about how digital currencies and the exchanges where they trade fit into financial markets, she said. “It’s a reminder that basic consumer protection principles still apply” in the digital asset world, she added. “The tech people coming in don’t necessarily realize they’re playing with fire.”

Startups have raised hundreds of millions of dollars selling such tokens in 2017, bypassing traditional initial public offerings of shares -- a process overseen by the SEC -- in favor of so-far mostly unregulated ICOs. The commission examined the sale of tokens to fund a startup known as the DAO last year, which raised about $150 million over four weeks, according to the SEC’s investigative report released Tuesday.

The agency’s enforcement division was asked to decide if the DAO token sales “violated federal securities laws with unregistered offers and sales of DAO Tokens in exchange for ‘Ether,’ a virtual currency,” the report said. The SEC decided not to bring charges in the DAO token sale case.

Instead, the SEC report said it wanted “to caution the industry and market participants: the federal securities laws apply to those who offer and sell securities in the United States, regardless whether the issuing entity is a traditional company or a decentralized autonomous organization, regardless whether those securities are purchased using U.S. dollars or virtual currencies, and regardless whether they are distributed in certificated form or through distributed ledger technology.”

One recent ICO was led by Gnosis, a prediction market application based on the Ethereum blockchain. It raised $12.5 million in 12 minutes on April 24, resulting in a market value of almost $300 million. It’s generated no revenue and has little more than a white paper describing what it intends to do. Yet its tokens, which would allow users to bet on things such as election outcomes, have soared 200 percent since early May, according to Coinmarketcap.com.

Open Question

An open question is whether the SEC will apply these new standards to coin offerings that have already happened, said Walch, who is also a research fellow at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies at University College London. And while the SEC won’t pursue action related to the DAO token sale, “I don’t see anything in here that says there won’t be enforcement actions against others,” she said. Some recent ICO have been “egregious,” she said. “I’d be very surprised if they were willing to shove them all under the rug.”
The SEC decision comes a day after the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission gave LedgerX LLC approval to offer options trading based on bitcoin. That could help mature the business of bitcoin trading by helping traders offset risks with derivatives. But it also underscored the fact that digital currencies, decentralized technologies that appeal to the libertarian-minded, probably cannot escape governments.

ICOs offer an attractive deal to young companies: going directly to customers for funding, avoiding venture-capital firms and other professionals. SEC Chairman Jay Clayton addressed the balance he’s trying to strike, saying in the regulator’s statement that, “We seek to foster innovative and beneficial ways to raise capital, while ensuring -- first and foremost -- that investors and our markets are protected.”

“What the SEC did not say is that all tokens are securities. Rather, they suggest a facts-and-circumstances test,” Peter Van Valkenburgh, research director at Coin Center, said in an email. “We believe that applying the same facts-and-circumstances test to other tokens will mean that some do not fit into the definition of securities, particularly tokens with an underlying utility rather than a mere speculative investment value.”

Exchange Registration

Markets such as Coinbase Inc.’s GDAX and Gemini Trust Co. that offer trading in digital assets so far have dealt mostly with state, not federal, regulators. The SEC now says that will likely change. “Additionally, securities exchanges providing for trading in these securities must register unless they are exempt,” the agency said.

Calling that a “big deal,” Walch said, “Those in the crypto world have been acting as if they live in an alternate universe, and the SEC has delivered a reminder that they still live in the real world, with real investors and real people making decisions that they must be accountable for.”

Why Can’t Americans Ditch Checks?

In an era of smartphones, online banking, and Venmo transfers, the rest of the world has weaned itself off paper.

By Katie Robertson

‎July‎ ‎26‎, ‎2017‎ ‎4‎:‎00‎ ‎AM

The first time Amelia Howells ever wrote a check, she was 28 years old and standing in a Connecticut apartment leasing office, with no idea what to do.

The British expat had just moved to the U.S.; she’d never had to write a check in London or during her seven years in Switzerland.

“I had to sit down with a woman to learn how to do it. She thought it was hilarious and called in all the other people in the office to have a laugh at me,” she recalls. “In Switzerland, they don’t even have checks. We did all our rent and utilities online, and that was back in the early 2000s.”

In an era of smartphones, online banking, and Venmo transfers, the U.S. still can’t seem to wean itself off paper checks. In most countries, they’ve gone the way of the fax machine and the rotary telephone. But their demise isn’t coming to America any time soon.

Americans still reach for their checkbooks more than anybody else. In 2015, they each made 38 check transactions, on average, according to data from the Bank of International Settlements, the coordinating body for the world’s central banks. Compare that with about 18 in Canada, just 8 in the U.K., and almost zero in Germany. The only country with anywhere close to American numbers is France.

There are, of course, cheaper, faster, and more efficient alternatives. Electronic transactions clear quickly—no stamp or envelope needed—and cost their users about a 10th as much as checks to process. (A 2015 survey of businesses by the Association for Financial Professionals pegged the median cost of issuing a check at $3, compared with under 30 cents for a electronic transaction.) That’s not even taking into consideration that box of replacement personal checks, which can cost a consumer more than $20. Using peer-to-peer payment apps to transfer money between checking accounts, however, doesn’t incur fees.

Checks have been in decline in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, but up until a decade ago, they remained Americans’ favorite method of payment other than cash. And although electronic payments, debit cards, and credit cards are more popular these days, the rate of checks’ decline has slowed, according to a Federal Reserve payment study from last year.

In part, blame Americans’ comfort with them, and the fact they serve the underserved. Feedback from retailers suggests many older and rural Americans still use checks to pay for groceries and gas, says Tom Hunt, the director of treasury services for the Association for Financial Professionals. Particularly reliant on checks are the 33.5 million households that either don’t have bank accounts or supplement them with alternative financial services such as check-cashing and pawnshop loans. Far more of those households than fully banked households were paid by paper check, a 2015 survey by the FDIC found.

Banks are trying to push consumers toward cheaper, faster mobile banking and peer-to-peer services like Venmo and PayPal, but older Americans still aren’t totally sold. A 2015 Fed survey found just 18 percent of smartphone users age 60 and older had ever used mobile banking, up from 5 percent in 2011. And a more recent Bank of America report found that while 62 percent of millennials used peer-to-peer services, only 20 percent of baby boomers and 10 percent of seniors did. Still, 71 percent of the survey respondents believed children under 10 will never have to learn how to write a check.

“Our customers wrote almost a billion checks last year. Checks will be around for a while,” said Michelle Moore, Bank of America’s head of digital banking. “But P2P is what really is growing phenomenally year-over-year.”

Old habits die especially hard in the business world, where more than half of business-to-business payments are still made by check, according to an AFP survey from last year. The survey found the number of B2B check payments has risen slightly since 2013. “There are better, faster, more convenient, less costly payment methodologies in place, but with those comes the technology-adoption hurdle that a lot of companies just can’t get over,” said Hunt.

Then there’s the highly fragmented American banking system—there are more than 10,000 depository institutions, making it a challenge to implement changes across them all—and a central bank that doesn’t have the regulatory power to phase out checks. The Fed can’t mandate a change to how the U.S. uses payment systems.

“We have probably the most antiquated payment system in the whole world,” said Hunt. “It would be much harder to get a mandate to eliminate checks from a cultural standpoint, but also from a central bank standpoint.”

Take Europe. Finnish banks stopped issuing checks way back in 1993. Sweden dramatically cut down on them by introducing fees and marketing alternative modes of payment. The Netherlands abolished the check in 2002, Denmark officially killed it at the start of this year, and it’s all but extinct in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. The U.K. backed off plans to phase out checks by 2018 following a consumer backlash—but although banks still process them, they’re seldom used. (Europe’s one anomaly: France, which alone accounted for 71 percent of all the European Union’s checks in 2013.)

Attempts are being made in the U.S. to modernize the system, but a faster-payments task force the Fed convened in 2015 to investigate how to bring the U.S. banking system in line with the rest of the world has acknowledged formidable hurdles. “Given the breadth and complexity of the U.S. market,” it said in the first installment of its final report, “it is more challenging to implement improvements to the payments infrastructure in a coordinated way.” Last week, it released the second half of that report, setting a goal of implementing platforms to deliver real-time, secure electronic payments everywhere by 2020. That technology already exists—but as the report notes, unlike in other countries, any changes in the U.S. will be market-driven.

And they’ll be a long time coming. Americans haven’t seen any major improvements to checking since a 2003 federal law known as Check 21 first allowed banks to process checks electronically, without having to handle the actual paper checks. These days, practically no paper checks go through the banking system anymore, clearing times have come down to about a day—similar to electronic payments—and you can deposit checks from your phone.

Expats like Jane Searle, an Australian in New York, remain unimpressed. “People sometimes talk about this app that photographs checks and processes them, as if that’s innovative,” she said. “It’s just a bolt-on process to a practice that is shamefully backward.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-25/u-s-signals-clampdown-on-red-hot-digital-coin-offerings

[crimethink]

U.S. Signals Clampdown on Red-Hot Digital Coin Offerings
By Matthew Leising
‎July‎ ‎25‎, ‎2017‎ ‎5‎:‎16‎ ‎PM Updated on ‎July‎ ‎25‎, ‎2017‎ ‎6‎:‎10‎ ‎PM

SEC says ICOs, cryptocurrency exchanges subject to U.S. law

U.S. regulators said they have jurisdiction over one of the hottest new areas of finance: initial coin offerings of digital currencies.

Companies that raise money through the sale of digital assets must adhere to federal securities laws, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday. Issuers must register the deals with the government unless they have a valid excuse, as should exchanges that offer trading of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, the regulator said.


Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton. Appointed by...Donald J. Trump.

Making Jew York Great Again!





Expats like Jane Searle, an Australian in New York, remain unimpressed. “People sometimes talk about this app that photographs checks and processes them, as if that’s innovative,” she said. “It’s just a bolt-on process to a practice that is shamefully backward.”

Yes, because personal freedom & privacy is "backward."

Jane Searle is part of the Problem.

[singular_me]

gosh but at least now bitcoin is LEGAL :(

[madfranks]

gosh but at least now bitcoin is LEGAL :(

It was never illegal. It sprouted up out of nowhere, and regulators are just now getting around to deciding how to regulate it.

[madfranks]

The Rothschild Crime Syndicate knows Bitcoin isn't going away, so co-opting it, as they typically do, is the best alternative.

"The best way to control the 'opposition' is to lead it ourselves."

I'd really like to know how they plan on co-opting it. It's a decentralized network that spans the globe. Outside of a one-world government with jurisdiction around the globe, I don't see how it can be co-opted. They can try, as they have with the internet as a whole, but that's not a battle they can win.